The Great Experiment

The Estate homes are huge.

The above two photos are of probably the largest house I've ever seen

The French style

The Mediterranean style

A typical Celebration estate mailbox

These garage doors look like they open outwards, but they really roll up normally

A view from the backyard of one of the estates

Could this be my future homestead?

We even saw some wild turkeys roaming around one of the estates.

After I toured three Estate homes with the Celebration representative, I sat down and talked numbers with her. And the numbers ... can be large. I've got some math to do. The Village homes might be plenty large and much less expensive; I'm really thinking about them. (Why do I need so much space? Because I want to be able to spread out my miniature Lego town and train sets, because I want to have somewhere to display my old Macintosh collection comfortably, because I want to have plenty of room for whatever hobbies I'm delving into next.

After I finished up for the day at Celebration, Kristy and I went over to Downtown Disney in the hopes of catching a Cirque du Soleil show.

But Cirque du Soleil doesn't perform on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, so we went to DisneyQuest instead.

DisneyQuest has changed since I was last there a year or so ago. They used to charge a modest admission fee and then require you to carry a card with 'credits' on it; each game or attraction you played would take a certain number of credits, and there were plenty of stations around where you could 'recharge' your card with cash.

I guess enough people were really turned off by this that Disney now charges about $26 to get in, and all games and attractions inside are free (except the ones which dispense tickets for prizes). This has the immediate effect of making all the arcade games inside always busy, which is nice... but I wonder if it's going to discourage the development of fancier new games?

We went on the 'Pirates of the Carribean' virtual ride. I miss the old Hercules 3-D game, where our Greek heroes had to stop Hades, but the new Pirates game is a worthy successor. You're in a small boat with three cannons on each side (pulling a cannon's string fires it); the boat rocks as you sail around, and one of the (up to) five players is the 'captain' who can sail the ship around. It's the job of the other players on board to sink all sorts of other pirate ships on the seas, and thereby plunder their treasure. It's a lot of fun!

Overall, I think DisneyQuest isn't all that great. There are a few fun games, but many of them (the Virtual Jungle Cruise, the comic-book lightsaber VR game, the magic carpet ride) just seem to confuse and lose people until the time's up; there's not much to them. Kristy also noticed a place where queue railings led to a featureless wall, and in general the traffic patterns seem really messed up in the building, with queue lines stuffed into corners and major thoroughfares blocked by hordes of kids. I wonder what the future holds for DisneyQuest, and I wonder what ever happened to the guy who had the idea to install dozens of DisneyQuest card swipe devices, only to have them all no longer used.

After dinner there and enough time to play all the good games, Kristy and I called it a night... but not before realizing that we're both fans of Miyazaki! Way cool!!

[ Index | Day 17 ]